Lifting the veil on mother love

A new film breaks one of the last taboos: old women and sex. By Stephanie Bunbury.

Anne Reid says she was employed to play May, a pensionable widow who has an affair with her son's young builder, because the filmmakers wanted someone nobody would look at twice in the street.

"I don't know what I think about that," the actor says sharply. At 69, she thinks she is still in pretty good shape.

Reid stars in Roger Michell's film The Mother, which is scripted by the novelist Hanif Kureishi and is remarkable simply because it dares to break one of the cinema's few remaining taboos - the idea that a post-menopausal woman might be interested in sex.

"I think people can't bear to think their parents have sex with each other, let alone other people," says Michell. "The idea that old people, particularly old women, should be annexed from sexual experience is pretty universal."

Which is nonsense, as Anne Reid says. "Women don't lose their desire for sex at 55. I fancy young men all the time. They don't fancy me, unfortunately."

Reid is familiar only, if at all, from television comedies such as Dinnerladies. Her forte, as she says, is making people chuckle. She never expected to get a lead role like this, although in truth May is scarcely more glamorous than one of Victoria Wood's canteen workers.

When we meet May, she is fitting her life around the demands of a cantankerous husband (Peter Vaughan) on a visit to London from their home in the provinces, the pair of them clearly in the way of their ambitious, messed-up adult children. Her greatest ambition, constantly thwarted, is simply not to upset anyone.

When May's husband dies, her grief is tempered by a kind of unacknowledged relief. She is free, but to do what? When she asks the amiable builder, played by Daniel Craig, to come upstairs with her, she momentarily sloughs off the daily dutifulness of a whole life.

"She hasn't lived," says Reid. "She doesn't know what good sex is and if she doesn't grab the opportunity now, she never will. She'll die without knowing."

May is typical, Reid says, of a whole generation. "I was on the tail end of it, but you married a virgin and that was it. A lot of women of my age did their duty, had a couple of kids and then thought, 'I don't like this very much, but there's nothing I can do about it'."

Finally, however, May can do something about it. In the airy transience of the half-built conservatory, just two people shut in a room together, it seems possible to say what she wants. It doesn't end beautifully for her, Michell says, "but I think it ends better than if she had just gone back to that house and stared at her husband's slippers."

"There is a lot of me in this," says Reid. "I know what it's like to give up your own life; I did it for 15 years when my mother was ill and I had a small child at home. My husband developed cancer. There was no room for my career and I thought I'd had the last of it . . . But when my husband died, I thought, 'What will become of me?' "

Gradually, she went back to the stage; incredibly, her life began again.